1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of computer software and, more particularly, to an enhanced method and system for editing user selections.
2. Description of the Related Art
Presently, editing functions employed within a graphic user interface (GUI), such as cut, copy, and paste functions, can be tedious to utilize. Multiple steps must be accomplished to complete many commonly conducted tasks. The most repetitive and arduous of these tasks involves posting user selections to target destinations.
Consider, for example, a typical copy/paste operation, wherein a user copies text from a Web site to a word processing document formatted for a specific word processing application. Initially, the user can select a block of text from within the Web site. Next, the selected text can be placed into a temporary storage location, such as a clipboard, by performing a “copy” operation. Then, the user must navigate to the word processing application, opening it if necessary. Once opened, the word processing application must be instantiated. That is, a document within the word processing application must be opened. At this point, the user can determine an insertion point within the target document and can perform a “paste” operation. The result of this sequence of operations is the placement of the selected text within the selected word processing document at the chosen insertion point.
Notably, throughout the copy/paste operation, the original application granting access to the Web site remained open. Accordingly, computer resources, such as random access memory (RAM) and central processing unit (CPU) processing cycles, were consumed by the open application. While such consumption of resources can be acceptable to users utilizing simple software applications hosted on powerful hardware, system performance can be unacceptably disrupted when the user utilizes demanding software applications hosted on limited hardware. Systems simultaneously running multiple applications, like an email program, word processor, and Web browser, are especially prone to system degradations during conventional copy/paste operations.
Additionally, the size of a user selection being pasted can be a limiting factor. A user selection can be especially problematic when the user selection includes at least one graphic, object linking and embedding (OLE) object, video, or other such large object. For example, a user copying multiple OLE objects, such as charts and documents, and placing them into a presentation application, can consume inordinate amounts of memory, often tens or hundreds of megabytes per edit. Moreover, because many modern applications allow users to “undo” the last series of operations, many sequences of edits and associated objects can be simultaneously stored within memory. Consequently, conventional editing can consume vast amounts of hardware resources resulting in system lags, general performance degradation, and even crashes.
Even those rare users not battling hardware limitations can be frustrated with traditional editing methods. In illustration, consider a user attempting to transfer information from a spreadsheet to a word processing document. Assume for formatting reasons that the user must copy the values of spreadsheet cells, one cell at a time. Using conventional editing processes, a user must select a cell from within a spreadsheet cell, trigger a copy function, navigate from the spreadsheet cell to the word processing document, specify a position within the word processing document to which a copy of the selected cell is to be posted, and trigger a paste operation. Each value transferred from each spreadsheet cell to the word processing document requires another iteration of the above process.